The Extended Reality Blueprint: Demystifying the AR/VR Production Process

By Annie Eaton

Follow a tried-and-tested approach to integrating augmented and virtual reality into your business

The Extended Reality Blueprint focuses on design for non-gaming or gaming adjacent applications in extended reality (XR), including augmented and virtual reality. Author Annie Eaton is a leading producer of immersive content in the XR space. Many of Annie's clients come to her with the same questions, often not knowing where to begin as they seek to implement extended reality solutions into their business. This book presents the discovery and product development process through an immersive technology lens. You will walk through the XR production process and learn how to apply this technology directly within your organizations in a meaningful and effective way. Join leading businesses like Delta Air Lines, Mars Wrigley, Georgia-Pacific, and JLG Industries, and learn how top companies are leveraging XR for greater market share, engagement, and profit.

• Learn about the latest applications of extended reality (XR), including augmented and virtual reality.
• Discover the steps of the XR product development process, including how to find profitable uses of XR and decide on technology suites.
• Assemble effective teams of XR developers, designers, artists, and other key members to bring your projects to fruition and success.
• Learn from the real-world examples and lessons learned of businesses that have taken the leap into extended reality.

The Extended Reality Blueprint, delivers a concrete, actionable process for brining extended reality into your organization and embracing this crucial technology to remain current.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781394207695

Book preview

ANNIE EATON

THE EXTENDED REALITY BLUEPRINT

DEMYSTIFYING THE AR/VR PRODUCTION PROCESS

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Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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To my Futurus team past, present, and future, who teach me something new each day.

Acknowledgments

WRITING THIS BOOK has made me reflect on the past decade and what I've learned. The entrepreneurial journey is difficult, lonely, and trying, filled with the highest of highs and lowest of lows. My husband, Jake Lance, has been with me since before day one, advocating for me and supporting me like no one else could. I love you, and you mean the world to me. I'm privileged to share my life with you. Starting a business would have only been a dream if it weren't for the partnership of Peter Stolmeier, who taught me so much in the world of extended reality. Thank you for your friendship and for sharing this transformative technology with me. And Futurus could not have become the incredible brand it is today without the dedication of Amy Stout, who has become my most trusted advisor and closest friend over the years.

I want to thank my family for their unconditional support and love. I am truly blessed to have Danice and Rick Eaton as my parents. They never doubted what I could accomplish, even when it sounded crazy to the rest of the world. And to my siblings, Richard Eaton and Holly Arencibia, thank you for putting up with me all these years. You helped shape me into a strong person, and I'm inspired by both of you every day. Thank you also to Dirk Rountree, Paul Welch, Chan Grant, David Macias, Elijah Claude, Victoria Savanh, Adaobi Obi Tulton, and Venkatasubramanian Chellian for helping me make it to the finish line with my first book. To the rest of my family, friends, and peers, your support as I traverse through the entrepreneurial journey has been incredibly meaningful, and I appreciate each and every one of you. I would not have gathered even a fraction of this knowledge if it weren't for the people in my life that have been along for this ride with me.

About the Author

Annie Eaton is an immersive content producer, specializing in engaging and interactive virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. She is the founder and CEO of extended reality-focused company Futurus, which produces training and product visualization applications and provides technology consulting for various organizations and nonprofits. In addition to her current role as CEO of Futurus, she also serves as executive producer of Amebous Labs, a virtual reality–focused game studio, publishers of Loam. She stays involved in her local Atlanta technology community, managing XR Atlanta, an organization that supports thousands of extended reality enthusiasts and professionals across the city and beyond. Annie is also involved with Women in XR Atlanta, Women in Technology (WIT), and The Academy of International Extended Reality (AIXR) and serves on multiple industry advisory boards.

Prior to her work in extended reality, she earned her degree in international affairs and modern languages from The Georgia Institute of Technology. She initially entered a career in marketing and communications, where she was first introduced to virtual reality technology. After being exposed to early virtual reality hardware and experiences, she made the leap to enter the field of immersive technology and forged her own path through entrepreneurship. Annie has found a way to blend her creative, communications, and technology experience to build an innovative team that tackles the latest challenges in extended reality production.

She has been recognized by various organizations for her work in tech, including Women in Technology's Woman of the Year Award, Women in IT's Rising Star Award, and Technology Association of Georgia's Young Professionals' Technologist of the Year Award. Her projects have won recognition from Fast Company in their Innovation by Design award series. Annie has vast public speaking experience, having been invited as a speaker for conferences, podcasts, educational institutions, and corporate events to share her love and knowledge of immersive technology. She resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with her family and dogs. The Extended Reality Blueprint is her first book.

Introduction

MY EXTENDED REALITY career was formed at the intersection of hard work and happenstance. As with many of my colleagues, my interest in extended reality, or XR, came out of nowhere. It happens one random day when someone is introduced to the tech for the first time, and the next day, they're obsessed. This is my story: one day in 2013, I was introduced to the Oculus DK1 virtual reality headset (at the moment, the most successful Kickstarter of all time) by my coworker Peter, and I was instantly hooked. There weren't many resources to learn about extended reality for people like me—non-developers—other than academic journals and Reddit, polar opposites. So, with the encouragement of that same coworker, I began to read everything I could get my hands on.

This went on for months. I even got the opportunity to interview at Oculus, which took course over several months in 2014, right on the heels of their acquisition by Facebook. I can honestly say (now) that I am grateful that didn't happen. That was probably the best no I've ever gotten in my life because it made me want to prove them wrong. There was a place for me in the industry, and I was going to prove it. And nearly a decade later, I am confident to say I did.

Before any inkling of a company was formed, I needed to network in my local area of Atlanta, Georgia. That same coworker and I decided to start a meetup group, and it had an unexpected organic growth that proved to me that my city was ready to accept virtual reality technology. The strategy behind the first event wasn't much at all. Peter and I created a group called Atlanta Virtual Reality Meetup on meetup.com and posted our first event with the title Try out some exciting demos and talk to others about virtual reality. That's about the strangest event title I've ever heard, but it worked. In addition to sharing with friends and posting on Reddit, the venue that allowed us to set up shop sent out the event to their mailing list. We didn't realize what a powerful mailing list a gaming bar would have, but nearly 200 people showed up (triple the amount that RSVP'd), and there was barely any room to walk around—it was overcrowded. People loved it, and they wanted more.

It was in that moment I knew this opportunity was much larger than I realized. Peter and I had to figure out what to do after the success of this gathering. People were asking questions, and we needed to give them answers. We attended other local events to demonstrate the technology, and my name started to be associated with virtual reality in Atlanta. Strangers were contacting me to ask how their organizations could leverage virtual reality. I'd become the posterchild for the virtual reality community in Atlanta almost overnight. I had no intentions of starting a business when this whole journey started, but I was also not going to ignore the slew of inquiries coming my way. I did want to work in the industry after all, and maybe this was my chance. So, after a meeting with Peter and a woman who had reached out to me asking if we could provide some guidance, he and I stayed after in the coffee shop parking lot. We talked about this crazy idea of starting a business to help people find their virtual reality use cases. Prior to the release of the Oculus DK1, headsets were so expensive they were limited to industries such as military and medical. The emergence of cheaper hardware meant access for all, and we wanted to help everyone find a way to use it.

I bring all of this up to say that I didn't have a computer engineering background or years of creative agency experience prior to getting into my field. This industry is so ripe with opportunities that with an idea and the tools to bring it to life, anyone can become a creator. Yes, it was an immense amount of work to get where I am today, but it came from an inspiring moment and a vision of future possibilities.

There are so many aspects of the work that I do that I had to just figure out. The budding network of extended reality enthusiasts was a close-knit community when I started. Heck, it wasn't even called XR until there were so many digital realities that we needed a consolidated term. I asked questions when I could, but most outcomes were a result of intense Google searches and trial and error. My goal with this book is to provide a jumping-off point, a resource, an account of lessons learned, so that you can start with a leg up. This book consists of nearly a decade of findings and best practices summed up in one place, by someone who has tried all of it. And why share all this information when I'm still using it to grow my company? The technology is only as good as its adoption rate. The more people that produce effective, comfortable, and immersive content, the faster the tech will grow. There isn't a place for any of us without an audience, and there is no audience without good content. The bottleneck isn't in the hardware—it's in the software and experiences that make the hardware great.

Definitions are important, but they are also ever changing. There are three that I will use the most throughout this book: virtual reality, augmented reality, and extended reality. This is how I define them as they pertain to this book and my work:

Virtual Reality (VR)

Technology leveraged to immerse oneself in a computer-generated 3D world through use of a head-mounted display, completely occluding the view of the physical world.

Augmented Reality (AR)

A digital overlay of 2D or 3D content onto the physical world, typically experienced with a smartphone, tablet, or wearable device.

Extended Reality (XR)

A universal term inclusive of immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and spatial computing.

This book will go through my process from the inception of an idea through its deployment. But before we can go through the process, there are some barriers that need to come down with how we think of digital content to begin with. We've been taught most of our lives to think on paper or on a flat screen, and those mental habits need to be shattered. The medium of extended reality gives all of society a new way to share their knowledge, creativity, and ideas. It is extremely difficult to come up with anything original, and now we have an opportunity to do so. Growing up, my uncle would bring up his Society of Original Thought or SOOT as he calls it. He's talked to me about it since I was very young, and the idea is to challenge yourself to come up with original ideas. It seems nearly impossible as there have been limited opportunities for original ideas and applications due to the inundation of products, services, and content for anything and everything. But with extended reality technology, we get to drop the norms and guidelines that the physical world constrains us to. We need familiarity somewhat for adoption but do not need to limit ourselves to what we already know and what is possible in the physical world.

Once these mental barriers have been removed, we can go forward with the production process. We must start at the end deployment to choose which technology type within the realm of XR we want to leverage. Making that decision at the start of a project has significant benefits when it comes to development tasks. This book will walk through exercises to help you choose the right technology for the use case, which will save a great deal of production time if determined early.

Once that deployment method is determined and a use case is clearly defined, you're off to the races. We find that over half of the process is design, documentation, asset gathering, and planning. It seems excessive, but the clearer a vision the development and art team have, the faster they can produce something incredible. If documentation is disorganized, inconsistent, or missing pieces, there is so much more back-and-forth that takes place and wastes time. Design is the most important part of any project, and it's also viewed as the least important by many (most often by my clients). Stressing that importance and baking it into every schedule, meeting, and discussion will build good habits from the start.

By laying a strong foundation, incredible creativity will shine through. When I first started my business, I thought processes were creativity-crushing vehicles. But it was only when I started putting processes in place that I didn't have to think as hard about the mundane repetitive aspects of work and was able to think more freely. Extended reality technology has plenty to offer, but that can be overwhelming. Leveraging processes to help guide openness and opportunity will get you to a workable idea much faster. The remainder of the book focuses on getting to that end goal of a successful deployment. From user testing to iteration, finalizing interactions to quality assurance, the many components that go into delivering an exceptional experience seem endless. This book will distill that down into manageable chunks to make the seemingly impossible possible.

I have learned the hard way how difficult it can be to produce extended reality work, and I wanted to create a blueprint to help others learn from the challenges I've been through. The demand for this type of immersive content is only going to grow, so we need more producers, developers, artists, and designers. I truly believe that anyone from any background can find a place in the field of extended reality. But to